Not an April Fools gag: Bikini waxes for 8-year-olds

“Nope,’ she says. ‘There’s not. Doesn’t matter. That’s when the mothers are starting them these days.'”

(…)

“‘I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?’ Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. ‘It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.'”

Presuming these girls aren’t actually having sex (and these days that’s a big presumption), it goes to something I’ve written about before:

the decoupling of sex from physical realities.

Pregnant women and little girls want to look “sexy”. Mothers letting their daughters get tongue piercings and thinking its just a variation on ear piercing (half of the daughters probably do, too). Male strippers dance with poles, for female audiences, for reasons that escape me, and probably them. And women pretend to be turned on by these displays, even though they really aren’t.

But it’s all just part of “what you do” without really thinking about why.